down poison
by Meia
Summary: Written for an AU pairing challenge. Reno, Kadaj, drugs, sex, and violence.


Written for an AU pairing challenge on the adventchildren LJ community. The title of the fic comes from a song about a guy whose girlfriend gave him an STD and left him. THIS IS SIGNIFICANT SOMEHOW.

---------------------  
_  
welcome to my world, she said  
do you feel alive, she said  
it's all a bad dream spinning through your lonely head…_

**down poison**.

The heavy beat of the dance floor is muffled, but it still shakes the floor with every step he takes towards the club's back room, a place that not even the staff sets foot into. His nightstick is warm against his palm, the false heat of metal, and his grip tightens unconsciously on it as he reaches that nondescript door and swings it open.

They look up as one when he walks in, stride loose with a carefully calculated swagger. His hair falls into his eyes; he blinks it away. It makes the world seem like it's veiled in red.

"I heard what you did to Shinra and Avalanche," he drawls, not bothering to hide his Sector 3 accent. Shinra's pet territory, except not. Not anymore. He leans against the door, gaze flicking over each of the three silver-haired men inside. They're just boys, really. Pretty young boys. He probably has a decade on the one sitting in between the other two, legs crossed at the ankle, silver hair falling all over his face and just brushing his shoulders. They're pretty young boys who destroyed the two biggest suppliers in Midgar in under a week.

The boy in the middle giggles, a smooth, poisonous sound. His eyes are the cat-slit green of a Jenova addict, a glow that might drown him if he isn't careful.

"Are you looking for revenge?" the boy gestures, and his companions relax, hands moving away from the weapons that they'd been about to draw.

"No," Reno says, resting his nightstick against his shoulder, a familiar weight. "I'm looking for a job. I seem to be out of one. Don't s'pose you'd know anything about that."

Kadaj giggles again. "It's not that easy, you know." The childish frankness of his voice makes Reno wonder who broke him. Who the person was, who took this boy and made him crazy. "You can't just /join/ the Reunion like that."

"I'm sure Mother will make an exception," Reno says. "Just this once."

This time, Kadaj doesn't laugh. The smile that spreads over his face is slow and cold and snakelike, and Reno smiles back.

------

Jenova started showing up five years ago, tiny packets of dirty green powder hidden among their normal stuff. Jenova made you stronger, faster, honed your senses and reflexes to a razor-fine edge. Jenova made you feel invincible. Jenova was rare, expensive, and incredibly addictive.

Jenova, as they found out when Sephiroth flipped out and started killing the upper echelon of Shinra with a giant sword, had the unfortunate side effect of driving you batshit fucking crazy.

And that was how Shinra and Avalanche first learned about the Reunion.

------

A welcoming present, Kadaj tells him.

Elena glares up at them when the door swings open, a venomous expression that Reno's familiar with, although he's never seen Elena make it before. He has a theory that kindergartens have a class where they teach girls how to look at you as though they'd like to carve your balls out with a rusty spoon. If they let her have a spoon, she'd probably give it the old college try, even though her leg is broken in three places.

When her eyes finally adjust to the sudden light, Elena's expression turns to relief and surprise. He kneels down next to her as she opens her mouth, presses a hand against her lips. She closes her mouth obediently, faintly puzzled but trusting. His fingers come away bloody.

"Sorry, 'laney," Reno tells her. "A guy's gotta look out for number one, y'know?"

There's no number one in the Turks, but there's no Turks without Shinra, and he's not entirely sure if there can be Elena without the Turks. Elena looks up at him like she doesn't know what he's saying, even when he slides a hand into her jacket's inner pocket and pulls out her tiny gun. She's still looking at him with wide blue eyes as he presses the barrel against her chest, thumbs the hammer back, and fires.

He takes the shot at an awkward angle, and the recoil bruises his hand, but Reno wants it to hurt. Elena's sigh is like a flutter of wings.

"Huh," Kadaj says, his head tilted to the side like an inquisitive bird. "I thought you were going to keep her." Reno pockets the gun carelessly.

"It's better for her to leave a beautiful corpse," he says, and falls into step next to Kadaj.

Behind them, Elena bleeds onto the concrete, a thousand slow shades of red.

Later, in a tiny public toilet, Reno washes the blood off his hands, water from the faucet running red, and red, and red. The mirror is dull with corrosion and grey concrete shows through the glass in patches where water has completely eaten the silvered backing away. Reno stares at his reflection, tattoos--not really one of his best ideas, in retrospect--looking like bloody scars underneath his eyes.

"Smile, you son of a bitch," Reno tells himself, and does.

-----

Two weeks he's with them, and Reno learns--in no particular order--that they like black leather, kittens, and girly cocktails, meaning that he's learned approximately nothing at all. He hasn't seen them with anybody, least of all the Mother they speak of in hushed, worshipping tones, and he hasn't seen them actually /do/ anything, but Jenova continues to flood the streets; double the quality of what they used to sell at a quarter of the price. Reno can't take one walk down Wall Street now without running into a half-dozen addicts. The worst thing, he thinks vaguely, is that he's starting to get used to the glow.

"Where the fuck are you getting it from?" Reno wonders aloud, slightly drunk. "Is Mother your supplier or something?"

"Of course not," Yazoo says, indignant, straightening from his artistic drape against the couch. "How rude."

"It's okay," Kadaj says placidly, as sure as a prophecy. "He'll understand soon."

Reno lights a cigarette, the familiar rush of nicotine cool in his lungs, and says something uncomplimentary about cryptic leather fetishists. Kadaj raises an eyebrow and leans forward, and his glove is smooth slide against Reno's skin as he snatches the cigarette away.

"You're not going to tell me that it's a bad habit, are you?" Reno asks. Kadaj brings it to his mouth.

"No." Kadaj says, and takes a long, slow drag. The white smoke curls around his face, blends in with his hair like it's an illusion. "I was going to tell you it's polite to share."

"Hypocrite," Reno says. When Kadaj hands the cigarette back, it tastes of mint, ozone, and mako sours. Reno smokes it down to the filter.

-----

Another two weeks and nothing changes, until Kadaj stops him on his way out one evening.

"I have a present for you," Kadaj says.

"Is it going to be as nice as the last one?" Reno asks blandly.

"Nicer," Kadaj tells him. Reno raises an eyebrow, but when Kadaj walks away, he follows.

Kadaj's room is surprisingly normal. Reno takes a seat on the edge of the bed, which is only a little bigger than the single bed he has in his own tiny apartment, and not (as Reno had half-expected) fitted with black silk sheets, or lace. Or black silk lace.

He's not exactly sure what he expects Kadaj to pull out of the drawer that he's rummaging in; a gun, a knife. Maybe the severed head of a chicken. The syringe that Kadaj cradles protectively in his fingers is a surprise--not just because Kadaj doesn't strike him as the sharing kind, but also because even though the needle is a pristine glitter under the harsh lights, the contents of the syringe are dirty brown and /glowing, casting a faint moving shadow on Kadaj's leather glove.

"What the fuck did you cut it with?" Reno stares. "Radioactive motor oil?"

"Trust me," Kadaj coos, taking his left hand and turning it palm up, setting the needle against the vein at his elbow. Reno watches it slide under his skin, sweet as a butterfly's kiss. The plunger inches down, millimetre by millimetre, until the syringe is empty and Jenova's running through his bloodstream like poison.

Outside, the wind starts to pick up, whispering through the trees like it's trying to share a secret. Reno tries to listen closer, but he can't concentrate; his skin has started to itch like he's become too large for it, like it's a cocoon that he's about to burst out of. He claws his heavy jacket off irritably and shoves it aside, rubbing at his arms. Flourescent lights almost blind him until he feels the light brush of Kadaj's hair against his face and realises that his eyes are closed. The room is dimmer when he opens them; at some point in time Kadaj has snapped the lights off, and when Reno turns his head to the side, he's met with a blank wall and remembers that they're two storeys underground and there aren't any trees in Midgar. Kadaj's smile is a clear line in the dark.

He's moved from rubbing his arms to scratching them, watching as white lines darken to red in long, perfect parallel. Kadaj grabs his wrist and bends over it to soothe the careless scratches with his tongue, silver hair falling over his face and Reno's skin like silk. His mouth leaves a hot trail that somehow eases the fire prowling under his veins, and Reno relaxes against the bed with a sigh.

Kadaj crawls over him, chest to chest, one hand moving down to unzip his pants. Reno lets him do it. Slim fingers curl around him, and Kadaj leans up to swallow his harsh moan with a kiss. Reno's heart is beating hard and fast in his chest, like a bird trying to break free of his ribcage, but his limbs are a boneless sprawl against the bedsheets.

The loose grip tightens, skirting the border of pain, and Kadaj sits back to let him cry out this time. His voice is a raw-edged thing that lingers in the air, floating in the rising sea-wave of static that's almost beginning to make sense. Reno reaches out blindly, hooks an arm behind Kadaj's neck, and pulls him down so that he can lick a trail up that delicate throat, starting at the hollow between Kadaj's collarbones and ending at the sensitive skin at the corner of his jaw. Reno latches on there and sucks hard; he almost expects to leave no mark on that perfect skin, so pale it's almost bloodless, but Kadaj bleeds just like anyone else, broken capillaries leaving starbursts of red under his skin.

As if in retaliation, Kadaj starts to move, the leather of his glove smooth, the warm pressure unrelenting and /oh god perfect, and the rhythm of Reno's breath starts to break down into increasingly erratic panting. He closes his eyes and shudders as Kadaj strokes a thumb over the tip of his cock, clutching at leather-clad skin so hard that his fingers ache. Reno has to be leaving bruises, but Kadaj only smiles as his fingers dig into fabric and muscle and skin. Kadaj kisses him, and he can feel the curve of Kadaj's smile widening just before he licks Reno's bottom lip, one final languid swipe, and bites down.

Reno hisses, but the sting is nothing compared to the sensation of Kadaj lapping at the blood, tongue hot and slick and wet against his mouth, working at the edges of the tiny wound as though he's trying to take in as much of Reno as he can. Copper-sweetness, the sound of impossible wind, and the warmth under his skin all blend together into a synaesthetic jumble, a rising, incomprehensible wave. He gasps, deep, shuddering breaths that worsen the ache in his lungs and make him pant harder.

"Shh," Kadaj says, lips still stained with the slightest shade of red.

Kadaj strokes a thumb over the tip of his cock, and everything in the world shatters.

Impossible noise washes over Reno. It reminds him, irrelevantly, of the analog radio that Rude used to have in his ancient car, which Reno always made fun of because everyone else in, oh, the /world/ had a CD deck. He always turned the damn tuning knob too far, static turning into clear sound for a split second before collapsing back into noise, and it feels just. like. this. The seconds of clarity in his mind /could/ be an alien woman's voice, a seductive promise he can't understand, or it could just be the beginning of what's going to be a spectacular crash.

Reno listens to the whispering in his ear and realises this: They knew Jenova made a person crazy, but they never wondered how or why, and that was their first mistake.

"/Mother/," he says, like a revelation, and comes.

When he finally blinks away the stars, Kadaj is watching him carefully with those unnatural feline eyes, like he's trying to gauge Reno's reaction to a secret treasure that he's just shared. His body is heavy with post-orgasm lassitude, but Reno feels /powerful, everything brighter and clearer and louder than it should be.

"You understand now, right?" Kadaj asks, bringing his hand up and licking it slowly, tongue gliding over each of his fingers in turn.

"Oh yeah," Reno breathes. "I get it."

Reno pulls Kadaj into a deep kiss, strokes the inside of that velvet mouth with his tongue, and doesn't pull back until Kadaj sighs and melts against him. It tastes like blood and everything perfect.

"Hey, Kadaj," he says, one hand going to his pocket, the other slowly pulling down the zip on Kadaj's shirt, revealing pale skin in a deepening V. Cat-slit pupils dilate as Reno slides a hand under warm leather and strokes. Reno's always been the kind of guy who takes chances as they come.

"Mmm?" Kadaj murmurs.

"Your mom's a /whore/," he whispers into Kadaj's ear, lips curving up into a smile as he licks at the mark he'd left below it. The smile widens when Kadaj shoves him back so hard that he almost hits the wall. Elena's gun fits in his palm like it's been waiting for him.

"/You said you understood/," Kadaj says, betrayal in the stiff line of his back.

"I did," Reno replies smoothly, everything clearer than it's ever been before. "But 'drug-induced hallucination' just wouldn't scan."

He cocks the hammer, and to his Jenova-honed senses, the tiny click bounces around the room in a thousand different echoes. He only gets one shot, and it's not the person he thought it was meant for, but one shot is all he'll ever need.

"You /lied/ to me." Deep green eyes meet his, outraged but not afraid, even with a loaded gun in his face. Jenova makes you invincible, Reno thinks. Invincible, powerful, and goddamn fucking nuts. The hell of it is, Reno almost liked him.

He'd wondered, a few short weeks ago, just who it was that broke this boy, and now he knows.

"Goodnight," Reno says, and pulls the trigger.

---


End file.
